What is Referral Spam?

Referral Spam includes fake referring domains, keywords and events that pollute site analytics with erroneous data to bring attention to their site.

Referral spam is designed to look like legitimate traffic to your site. However, it’s actually fake traffic that takes advantage of vulnerabilities within Google Analytics’ tracking code. The point of referral spam is to bring attention to the spammer’s site and to get the site owner to visit it out of curiosity. This spam technique has been very effective on sites that are smaller and have less traffic, because the referral spam bubbles up to the top of the referral results in GA.

There currently aren’t any simple and non-technical solutions for stopping referral spam. The best options for removing referral spam are to follow the instructions from one of the referral spam guides listed below or to hire an expert in GA referral spam.